


Bodies Through Water

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dancing, Episode: s03e02 The Sign of Three, Ocean, Sherlock Loves John, Underwater, Waves, bodies, conductors of light, flying fish, particles, photons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 14:17:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1472875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>~to be in the body new and kelp-cold, alive; very like learning that yes, you can do what people do, which is love, and drown~</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bodies Through Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [professorfangirl (lizeckhart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/gifts).



> Happy birthday to [PFG](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl), writer-with, bodies and oceans and light--

_Therefore, if the light is fixed in that body, a secondary form will radiate from it; but when the light shines upon an exquisitely transparent body, it will not be fixed in it but will pass through its transparency. –Alhazen, The Book of Optics_

There are two phases of the dream.

In one the water closes over his head and he drowns. He doesn't come up gasping, break the surface finned, faceted, family _Exocoetidae_ , go jeweled and bright before the tide washed up, discovered, at dawn, flighted.

In the other the water closes over his head and he comes up, gasping, finds out, well, what it’s like, to be in the body new and kelp-cold, alive; very like learning that yes, you can do what people do, which is love, and drown, and die, and even then.

It goes on.

“John?”

He wakes to a wave.

“You in there? You’re all right.”

“I’ve got to tell you…”

“What have you got to tell me?”

*****

In the morning he slips slides under, looks at cells: sea-grass, fish, ventricle, striae. Thinks I never had a body until now, until I surfaced and you'd vanished, almost; until you let me turn you, current-caught, waltz and a dip and a rough laugh while your breath brushed the throat, almost, beachside in an old city, crushed in the hard hands of a smuggler.

_That you saved me._

_That sentiment is photons held in reserve, underwater, beautiful, different to stars but not really...is water in air and light refracted, reflected; moon- and rain- and fog-, all here, all you; all you, a last bow._

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [moonbow](http://bluenred.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/moonbow.jpg)
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> [ fogbow](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080529.html)
> 
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> [flying fish](http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/09/exocoetidae-fish-that-flies.html)


End file.
